To address the problem of ever-increasing bandwidth requirements that are placed on wireless data communications systems, various techniques are being developed to allow multiple devices to communicate with a single base station by sharing a single channel. In one such technique, a base station may transmit or receive separate signals to or from multiple mobile devices at the same time on the same frequency, provided the mobile devices are located in sufficiently different directions from the base station. For transmission from the base station, different signals may be simultaneously transmitted from each of separate spaced-apart antennas so that the combined transmissions are directional, i.e., the signal intended for each mobile device may be relatively strong in the direction of that mobile device and relatively weak in other directions. In a similar manner, the base station may receive the combined signals from multiple independent mobile devices at the same time on the same frequency through each of separate spaced-apart antennas, and separate the combined received signals from the multiple antennas into the separate signals from each mobile device through appropriate signal processing so that the reception is directional.
Under currently developing specifications, such as IEEE 802.11 (IEEE is the acronym for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 3 Park Avenue, 17th floor, New York, N.Y.), each mobile device may transmit a data block of variable length, and then wait for a predetermined timeout period after the data block for an acknowledgment from the base station to signify that the base station received the data block. If the base station transmits and receives on the same frequency, that fact may preclude the base station from transmitting and receiving at the same time, so that the base station waits until all incoming data blocks are complete before sending out any acknowledgments. However, since the data blocks are of variable length, a mobile device sending a short data block may experience an acknowledgment timeout while the base station is still receiving a long data block from another mobile device. The resulting unnecessary retransmission of the short data block may cause inefficiencies in the overall data communications, and under some circumstances may even result in a service interruption.